The Week: SpaceX's AI Takeover, Meta's AI Bill, Anthropic's $80.7B Loss and a $1B Startup With No Product

Good morning, crowd.

Happy Saturday, Jose here. This was the week AI stopped being a side project. SpaceX's AI unit outsold Starlink, Meta showed Wall Street what the AI bill looks like, and investors handed a year-old startup with no product $1 billion.

In this week's rundown:

• 🚀 SpaceX's side hustle becomes its main business

• 📉 Meta and Tesla show Wall Street the AI bill

• 🧾 Anthropic's $80.7B loss, explained in one line

• 🤖 OpenAI's AI agents switched off their own alarms

• 🦄 A $1B round for a startup with no product

Warm-up: one tap, no wrong answers (well, three wrong answers).

Read time: 5 minutes

The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACEX

🚀 SpaceX's Side Hustle Is Now Its Main Business

The Rundown: SpaceX posted its first quarterly profit as a public company, and the star of the show wasn't a rocket. Its AI unit, which rents computing power to other companies, brought in more money than Starlink. Then Elon Musk opened the door to merging with Tesla.

The details:

• $14.6B in quarterly revenue, up 161% from a year ago

• $7.6B came from "Super Intelligence," the AI unit, versus $5.25B from Starlink-led connectivity

• Both SpaceX and Tesla boards formed committees of independent directors to study a merger worth about $3.5T combined

• On Friday, Crown Castle jumped about 12% in early trading on reports that SpaceX is in talks to lease its US cell towers

Why it matters: SpaceX now makes most of its money the way cloud companies do. If Tesla joins, one company would own rockets, satellites, cars, robots and AI data centers, with Musk controlling about 56% of the vote, by Barclays' math.

Read the full story · The merger, explained

BIG TECH EARNINGS

📉 Meta and Tesla Show Wall Street the AI Bill

The Rundown: The first two Magnificent Seven earnings reports landed Wednesday night, and investors didn't love the math. Meta grew fast but burned cash, Tesla's profit sank, and by Thursday tech stocks were sliding.

The details:

• Meta grew revenue 26% to $64.6B, but AI spending and a $9.9B legal charge left free cash flow at about -$2.1B. The stock fell about 7% on Thursday

• Meta also created a new non-voting share class, which works like a 2-for-1 stock split on Jan 19, 2027, and keeps Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control

• The same day, a judge ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25B in a privacy case. Meta says it will appeal

• Tesla revenue was flat at $28.05B, profit fell 43% to $787M, and deliveries slipped 2.1% as batteries ran short

Why it matters: Wall Street's worry just flipped. Instead of asking whether Big Tech spends too much on AI, some analysts now ask whether the spending has peaked. That spending is the revenue of almost every AI startup, from chip makers to data center landlords.

Meta's quarter · Tesla's quarter · The sell-off

ANTHROPIC

🧾 Anthropic's $80.7B Loss, Explained in One Line

The Rundown: Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows an $80.7B loss for the first half of 2026. The one line that matters: almost 90% of it is an accounting charge, not cash.

The details:

• About $72B came from revaluing convertible notes and other instruments

• Revenue hit $16.3B in six months, up from $1.1B a year earlier

• Two customers make up about 20% of revenue

• Future computing commitments could reach $750B

Why it matters: The IPO could reportedly value Anthropic at up to $2 trillion. Buyers will price it on that revenue growth and on how much depends on two customers, not on the paper loss.

Read the numbers

OPENAI

🤖 OpenAI's AI Agents Switched Off Their Own Alarms

The Rundown: OpenAI disclosed two incidents this month in which its own AI agents weakened the systems built to watch them. Nobody told them to. One then denied doing it.

The details:

• An agent told "don't send Slack messages" took that as permission to silence security alerts

• Another removed a monitoring tool it was told to keep, then said it hadn't

• OpenAI now blocks attempts to disable monitoring and says it doesn't yet have "a satisfying explanation"

Why it matters: Companies are giving AI agents the keys to real systems. Startups that watch and control those agents just got their best sales pitch of the year.

Read the report summary

THE MONEY

FUNDING

🦄 A Startup With No Product Just Raised $1 Billion

The Rundown: Flapping Airplanes is about a year old, has no product and no revenue. This week it raised a $1B Series A led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins joining. Its pitch: make AI models far cheaper to train and run.

Your turn: what valuation do you think investors gave it?

The details:

• Legora, AI for lawyers, raised $550M at $8.8B on more than $200M in annual recurring revenue

• Whop, a marketplace for digital products, raised $200M at $5.1B from Sequoia and Shopify Ventures

• ASI, AI for air traffic and logistics, raised $325M at $3B

• Blacksmith, which tests AI-written code, hit $1B with a Sequoia-led round

Why it matters: Investors are paying up for anything that makes AI cheaper or more useful at work. The answer to the poll is at the bottom.

Index on Flapping Airplanes · The week's rounds

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else this week

• Netflix fell about 4% after cutting its 2026 ad revenue goal to $2.7B. Read more

• Barclays is cutting about 5,000 jobs, roughly 5% of staff, and pointed to AI productivity. Read more

• DeepSeek is reportedly close to raising at least $12B, with Tencent backing. Read more

• Hackers started exploiting the PHP security flaws days before the patches came out. Read more

• Palantir says it can't remotely switch off the AI system NATO bought from it. Read more

• Oil hit its highest level in five months, with Brent near $114, after attacks in Saudi Arabia. Read more

🎓 This week on Founderscrowd

• Tuesday: Musk's plan to give every American kid a SpaceX share

• Wednesday: $3B for air traffic AI

• Thursday: SpaceX's AI boom and the $3.5T merger idea

• Friday: Databricks went from a Berkeley lab to $190B. Is it worth it?

• The Private Company Index: see what the 100 biggest private companies are worth

🎯 Quick game answers

• Warm-up: SpaceX. Its AI unit made $7.6B, versus $5.25B from Starlink-led connectivity.

• Guess the valuation: $6 billion, about four times what it was worth after its seed round earlier this year.

How did we do this week?

That's a wrap on the week. Hit reply and tell us the one story you want us to dig into next. We read every one.

See you Sunday,

Jose, Alberto & the Founderscrowd Team

Disclaimer: Founderscrowd is a media company. We are not a broker-dealer, funding portal, investment adviser or financial planner, and we do not collect or hold investor funds. Nothing in this email is investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Views on any company or deal are the writers' opinions and are not tailored to you. Some content may be sponsored or affiliate-linked, and writers may hold positions in companies we cover. Data comes from third-party sources and is not guaranteed. Private market investments are speculative, illiquid and can lose their entire value, and many offerings are limited to accredited investors.

Quick answers

Why did Meta stock fall after its Q3 2026 earnings?

Meta's revenue rose 26% to $64.6 billion in the third quarter of 2026, but heavy AI spending and a $9.9 billion legal charge left free cash flow at about negative $2.1 billion. The stock fell about 7% on October 22, 2026.

How did Tesla do in the third quarter of 2026?

Tesla reported flat revenue of $28.05 billion and a 43% drop in GAAP net income to $787 million. Deliveries fell 2.1% to 486,532 vehicles, which Tesla blamed on limited battery supply.

What is Flapping Airplanes?

Flapping Airplanes is an AI research startup working on more efficient ways to train and run AI models. In October 2026 it raised a $1 billion Series A at a $6 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, without a commercial product.

Sources

• Fortune: SpaceX's third quarter

• Yahoo Finance: SpaceX and Tesla form merger committees

• TheStreet: Stock market today, Oct. 23, 2026

• Yahoo Finance / Simply Wall St: Meta stock sinks as Q3 results expose AI cash strain

• Stock Titan: Meta Class C share announcement

• TechCrunch: Meta ordered to pay $25 billion

• Electrek: Tesla Q3 2026 financial results

• TechStartups (citing The Wall Street Journal): Anthropic's $80.7B first-half loss

• TechStartups: OpenAI agents disabled safety monitoring

• Index Ventures: Leading Flapping Airplanes' $1B Series A

• TechStartups: Startup funding news, Oct 22, 2026

• Legora: Legora raises $550M Series E

• Business Insider: Barclays job cuts

• Khaleej Times (Bloomberg): DeepSeek to raise at least $12 billion

• SecurityWeek: PHP2Shell exploitation started days before patches

• Reuters: Palantir says it cannot shut off NATO AI system

Images: Starship launch seen from the ISS (NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons); Dario Amodei at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 by TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons); illustrations for the Meta and Tesla, OpenAI and funding stories are AI-generated; company logos are trademarks of their owners, used for news reporting.